Over the hills and far away

North Northumberland is England's farthest flung destination but it can seem even more removed, a world of its own where eccentric aristocrats roam sprawling estates and billionaires indulge in country pursuits. For Chris Ayres, it's the best place to escape to in the UK. Let's say you've landed yourself in a spot of bother. You're confident it'll all blow over - terrible misunderstanding, and all that - but in the meantime it might not be a bad idea to make yourself scarce for a few days. There are, however, a couple of, ahem, small problems: you can't use your passport (long story), and it's imperative that you avoid any major populated areas.

So, where do you go? Which God-forsaken nook or cranny of the British Isles is so inconveniently located, so little explored, so totally beyond the experience of the average city-dweller, that to go there is the next best thing to digging a hole in the ground and jumping into it? More to the point: does such a place even exist in this age of iPhones and Google Maps?

Well, yes, it does exist. And it's called Northumberland. Pictured:Holy Island Castle, which gets cut off by the North Sea every dayContinues on next page...

Actually, to be more specific: North Northumberland. That vast, spectacular expanse of wind-ravaged, sheep-blotted wilderness up the A-697 beyond Alnwick, coming to an end just before Kelso in the Scottish Borders. Don't think of it as a weekend destination: think of it as a cheaper and more convenient alternative to staging your own death. And yet for all its obscurity, you can get there in a 'borrowed' Range Rover, preferably loaded with some antique shotguns of similarly dubious provenance (you wouldn't want to come home without a few brace of grouse), after only half a day's spirited driving from W1. There's no need to slum it, either: today's North Northumberland has everything from a rock oyster farm to a teahouse owned by the family of the original Earl Grey, a fine-dining restaurant in Alnwick Castle, a high-end holiday-cottage rental company and, just over the border, a 22-room boutique hotel on the River Tweed, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe.

But it's the sense of escape that most appeals. Pictured: Alnwick Castle

The very fact that for years - without barely a shrug from the locals - the billionaire Getty family rented a hunting lodge just outside Wooler, the last town in England on the empty and winding A697, tells you everything you need to know about the privacy afforded by England's farthest-flung county. Likewise, Duncan Davidson, distant cousin of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and founder of the £1.4-billion homebuilding company Persimmon, keeps a 25,000-acre estate nearby, on which sits his grand 19th-century family home, Lilburn Tower, complete with an award-winning 'folly' built to commemorate the millennium. Pictured: The Cheviot Hills

If any more proof is needed of North Northumberland's status as bolthole for the rich and fabulous, look no further than the Percy family, owners of Alnwick Castle (the so-called 'Windsor of the North', and the original location for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films). Notable Percies have included the wayward Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, immortalised in Shakespeare's Henry IV: Part 1, and his similarly controversial descendant and namesake, the 11th Duke of Northumberland, a chain- smoking bachelor known for his mysterious illnesses, love of film and exotic female companions, who included Naomi Campbell's mother, Valerie, and the Never Say Never Again Bond girl Barbara Carrera.

Before his death in 1995 at the age of 42 (the exact cause was never clarified) the Duke, worth £150 million, discovered that a painting he'd dismissed as a fake and hung in a corridor at Alnwick, where visitors' shoulders rubbed against it, was in fact Raphael's The Madonna of the Pinks. Value: £22 million. Even for a man whose hellraising lineage went back to the Norman Conquest, it merited a raised eyebrow. Pictured: Clay-pigeon shooting lesson

But it's the unfeasibly glamorous current Duke, Ralph Percy, and his wife, Jane, the daughter of an Edinburgh stockbroker, who have generated the most attention in North Northumberland of late, largely because of their decision to sell the aforementioned Raphael to the Gettys, who intended to ship it to their family's J Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles. The Percys no doubt needed the money to help fund their long-overdue renovation of Alnwick Castle's 18th-century walled garden, but when news of the deal made it to Fleet Street (alas, not everything that happens in North Northumberland stays in North Northumberland), a great hoo-ha ensued, with the garden project being compared unkindly (and absurdly) to Marie Antoinette's extravagances at Versailles. After months of wrangling and a temporary export ban on the artwork, the Old Master was eventually purchased by the National Gallery. Yet the Percys' decision to get rid of the masterpiece has since been more than justified: The Alnwick Garden (home to a number of entirely legal cannabis plants in its 'Poison Garden' section) was opened in 2002 by Prince Charles (a close friend of the Northumberlands) and has gone on to become an immense success, revitalising the local economy while raising huge sums for its charitable trust. Pictured: A giant growing frame in The Alnwick Garden

I should probably declare an interest here: I grew up in North Northumberland (Wooler, to be precise), in the foothills of the Cheviots. Even when I was boy I got the sense that where I lived was a well-guarded secret; a place where things could happen, where heels could be cooled. From the upstairs bedroom of my parents' house, for example, you could occasionally see helicopters ferrying various unknown dignitaries and celebrities across the Milfield plain and setting down outside Fenton House, a hunting lodge owned by the Lambton family, still known for the 1973 sex scandal and subsequent MI5 probe that cost the late Lord Lambton his seat as a Member of Parliament. This is the same country pile that was later rented to the Gettys, although Anne Lambton, Lord Lambton's actress daughter, who played a dominatrix in the 1986 film Sid and Nancy, still entertains there, recently hosting the actor Matthew Rhys when they worked on the Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love. Pictured: River Tweed

Of course, for all of Northumberland's obvious advantages as a hideaway, the reader, being of means and taste, might be justifiably sceptical about the standards of hospitality so far out into the sticks. Yes, the Cheviots are the prefect habitat for the country sportsperson; and yes, the gloriously unspoiled white-sand coastline from Berwick to Druridge Bay is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, ideal for summer horseback rides or being viewed from 2,500ft in one of the gliders from Milfield airport. But can you get a decent cup of coffee, never mind a suitably comfortable place to stay? Pictured: Scott's View in Scotland, looking south over the River Tweed valley

To be perfectly honest, even as recently as the early 2000s, little had changed in North Northumberland with regards to food and accommodation since the days when Roman Polanski camped out in an earwig-infested trailer on Holy Island while filming his 1966 thriller Cul-de-Sac (about two gangsters on the run after a botched robbery). The only food available back then was to be found in the island's six grim pubs, open all hours due to the difficulty of enforcing licensing laws in a place that's cut off from the mainland by the North Sea for several hours at a time, with the exasperated French-born director complaining in his memoir: 'Tweed salmon is supposed to be the best in the world, but the pub cooks stewed it 'till the flesh turned to gray mush, whereas the skin, by some mysterious process, became tougher.' Pictured: Lookout tower on Holy Island

If only Polanski could visit North Northumberland today (alas, he can't, because of his status as a US fugitive, and Britain's extradition treaty with the USA). It's hard to overstate just how much the opening of The Alnwick Garden, along with its feat-of-engineering Treehouse restaurant (literally a treehouse, with trunks and branches growing through the floor) and newer sister establishment The Sanctuary (within the castle's medieval walls), has brought money to the area, transforming the options for the discerning traveller. For a start, Alnwick now has its own stylish boutique hotel, Blackmore's, in addition to the older and considerably more formal and expensive Roxburghe Country House Hotel, about an hour further north. Other impressive post-Alnwick Gardens establishments include the Earl Grey Tea House at Howick Hall, former home of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey himself: it's set in stunning gardens, with wood panelling, high ceilings and towering artwork. Aside from the excellent tea, the menu offers high quality soups and local fish plates, the latter hardly surprising given that Robson's Smokehouse, of Craster Kippers fame, is two miles up the road. Pictured: Earl Grey Tea House at Howick Hall

As for Holy Island, the pubs that so upset Polanski are still there, but now there's also an oyster farm, Lindisfarne Oysters, which will send you 50 of its delicious Crassostrea Gigas via the Royal Mail for £50. Failing that, you can sample them at The Barn at Beal, an excellent farm-owned restaurant/café in a renovated 19th-century cart shed just a few yards from the causeway. A word of warning, however: if you indulge too heavily at The Barn's well-stocked bar and then decide to venture on to Holy Island at the wrong time of day, you could end up trapped there by tides until the following morning. Which might be more of an escape than you'd bargained for. Pictured: Kippers at Robson's Smokehouse Published in Condé Nast Traveller October 2011